Spring

Most people are surprised to learn that two-thirds of Oregon is high desert, filled with sage brush and juniper trees and rocky scrabble. East of the Cascade mountains, you get into landscapes and plant life that remind me a lot of the areas of Colorado where I grew up.

West of the Cascades, however, in the verdant Willamette Valley where I now live, it’s a very different story. Here, we get rain, and lots of it. I knew this when I moved to Oregon to go to college thirty years ago, and this fact was one of the the area’s most appealing features. I had visions of walking with cute umbrellas and rain boots, sipping tea while reading by a cozy fire. I knew that ivy-covered hillsides, flowering evergreens, clean air, and year-round green grass owed their existence to lots and lots of rain.

Which is all well and good, unless you’ve lived in the Willamette Valley over the past couple of months, in which case you slowly go, as my good friend Elizabeth says, stark raving mad. In the month of March, we had record levels of rain, making it the wettest March in over fifty years. Some days, walking around under looming dark clouds in a wash of grey mist, you just want to punch something. And still, all we seem to be able to talk about is how much it’s been raining, as if we all don’t already know. We are smack in the midst of that  awkward time when we are still months away from summer (which usually arrives on July 5th), but can’t really remember the glorious crimson leaves and crisp sunshine of the past autumn. It all feels pretty bleak.

There was a moment this week, however, that caught me by surprise. I was walking from my car to the front door of my house, glad that the rain seemed to have stopped for a moment. The sun broke through the clouds and I paused  to appreciate the way it lit up the dripping, green plants in my front yard. From a distance, the gardens still seem sparse and colorless. The trees haven’t leafed out and it’s too early for the blazing colors of azaleas and rhododendrons that will arrive in a few weeks. Still, if I looked closely, I could see signs of life peaking through. Flowering trees—pear and star magnolias—sent out scented blossoms, white and fragile.

Fern fronds broke through the bark-dust covered ground, beginning to unfurl, their spiraled tips geometric and gorgeous. The color green, an Oregon staple even in winter, was refreshed by the arrival of new grass.

The delicate pink petals of false begonia that border my sidewalk will be gone in weeks, soon to be replaced by the more vivid, saturated blooms of summer flowers. They are easy to overlook, as are the carpets of tiny grape hyacinths.

None of these early ambassadors of spring shout or demand your attention. It’s easy to make a mad rush from building to building to avoid the dripping weather. After a bleak, dark winter, it’s easy to forget that you’ve ever seen the sun or will be likely to see it again. Fortunately, Doug went out into the front yard and documented everything in the photos you see here. It did me good to notice. Maybe—just maybe—I can make it until summer. By then I’ll be able to appreciate the wonderful things rain brings to my life.

But give me a few days….

 

Glinda the Good Witch

I have very mixed feelings about this photograph. On the one hand, it’s a lovely record of a family holiday, and the first Halloween we were able to spend with all four of our children. On the other hand, it is a vivid reminder of an evening I spent feeling intensely embarrassed, humiliated, and out of place. Like I said, mixed. I’m smiling in the photo, but only because it was taken before everything turned horrible.

As many of you may know, ours is a blended family. When Doug and I married, I brought to the family my six-year-old daughter, Katherine, and Doug brought Sam, 4 and Kate, 2. Together we had baby Sarah. While Katherine lived mostly with us, Sam and Kate spent the school year with their mom who lived at that time in Arizona. Although they spent summers and vacations with us, there were a number of events that were not a regular part of our family experience. Things like Halloween.

In 1996, we decided to fly down and spend the holiday in Arizona, take the kids trick-or-treating, and attend the Halloween carnival being held at their elementary school. Perhaps I was overcompensating just a little bit, but I decided to make costumes for all of us, strange given the fact that I don’t really sew. I even decided on a theme for all of our costumes. At that time, Kate, who was in kindergarten, was  entranced with Toto, the little dog from Wizard of Oz. She’d often crawl around the house on all fours, barking. She refused to answer unless I  called her Toto. She of course wanted to be Toto for Halloween. Fine, I thought. I can pick out characters for each of us and pull together the appropriate costumes. I found a pattern for a dog costume to fashion Kate’s makeover into Toto. I modified the pattern to make a Cowardly Lion suit for Sam. Katherine wanted to be Dorothy, so I sewed a blue gingham dress for her, using her red, high-top Converse shoes for ruby slippers. Doug made a perfect Scarecrow when I stuffed a sweatshirt and jeans with straw. Sarah didn’t get much say and became the Tin Man in a grey sweatshirt and a tinfoil-covered funnel that fit her round little head. I wasn’t sure which part to pick for myself. There weren’t many female roles left. I was already heading to Arizona as “The Stepmother” so I certainly didn’t want to be the Wicked Witch of the West. That pretty much left me with Glinda the Good Witch. I somehow created a dress out of white and gold tulle, accented by a  magic wand and a tiara from the kids’ dress-up box. There I am in the photo, tiara and all, blissfully unaware of the embarrassment to come.

We showed up in Arizona the day before Halloween, swimming in the hotel swimming pool, and hand-crafting  Halloween candy bags. Okay, maybe I was overcompensating a lot.

We went trick-or-treating in Sam and Kate’s neighborhood. The weather was lovely, and the kids hauled in lots of great candy for Halloween, even agreeing to share some of their Snickers Bars with me.

Then came the school carnival. It was a big event, widely advertised in posters around the school. Everyone was supposed to come in costume, including parents. There would be games and music and food and prizes. We all dressed up in our Wizard of Oz finery and walked into the school as a group. The kids dashed off, eager to play the games. I, meanwhile, looked around with an increasingly sick feeling in my stomach. In a huge gymnasium filled with people, Doug and I were the only adults dressed in costume. I looked at all the other parents, members of a fairly well-to-do suburb of Phoenix. There were the all other moms, all of whom seemed to have expensive haircuts, size 2 designer jeans and excellent manicures. They were all beautiful and tanned and relaxed. And there I was, with my fish-belly white Oregon skin, craft glue under my fingernails, holding a wand, of all things. I was sure everyone was looking at me, judging me, incredulous that I could be so eager, so earnest, so . . . so stupid. Doug at least was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. I, on the other hand, was wearing a tiara.

I  wanted to drop through the floor and disappear. I wanted to ditch Glinda the Good Witch and revert to Barbara the awkward stepmother visiting from out of town. When that didn’t appear to be an option, I wanted to gather all the kids together and leave immediately. The problem was, they were all having a great time throwing bean bags and fishing for little plastic prizes and eating hot dogs and cake. They were in their element. I was the one completely out of place. I felt like I didn’t belong—in the gym, in Arizona, or in the world of happy, intact families. I felt, in short, like a failure.

I stuffed the tiara and wand in one of the kids’ bags and mostly hid behind Doug. I tried to chat with some of the other adults, parents of Sam and Kate’s friends, but I’m sure I didn’t make much of an impression, or at least not a good one. Would you want to talk to a silent, cringing woman in a white fairy dress? It was one of the longest nights of my life, and one of the hardest in my career as a parent. That was over fifteen years ago, and although I’ve shared the story a few times with friends, I’ve never written about it.

Until now.

Why now?

My daughter reminded me of the story earlier in the week, and I began to ask myself this question. Why, when I am willing to write about most things—my childhood, my relationships, my mistakes or my lessons—do I stop at recording memories like this one. It’s not that I resist talking about times when I’ve made a fool of myself, because I’m actually fine with that (see my story “Denver“). What stops me is that it is part of my history of raising a blended family, which carries the distinction of being both the thing I am most proud of, and also the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Twenty years into the process, I am humbled by all that we learned, and so grateful for the relationships I now have with everyone involved. It is perhaps one of the most significant experiences of my life.

So why wait so long to write about it? Because it probably took the distance of all those years to figure out what it means. What did I gain from that night standing in a crowded gymnasium, feeling out of place and humiliated? Here’s a beginning:

That I can’t control my experiences. I can do my best to plan, make beautiful, thematically-correct costumes, cover all the bases, and still have it fall apart.

That I survived the evening. It wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t happy. But my kids had a great time. They loved their costumes. In the end, it was just one night in a series of thousands.

That I belonged in that gymnasium, whether or not I felt like it at the time.

Ultimately, I decided to write it in hopes that perhaps I will be able to connect to someone else who has felt foolish or out of place—you, maybe—and be able to say that even in the middle of sinking humiliation, you have company. With time and distance, it will make more sense. You will survive. You already belong.

The Red Flock

I thought I had a great idea. As is often the case, however, having a great idea is one thing. Making it happen is quite another.

We were coming close to the end of my sculpture class which, as I have written previously (in “What I Intend and What I Get”), has challenged me in new and sometimes painful ways. This was the second of only two projects created during the entire term, and it had only one requirement: it had to be kinetic. In other words, it had to move. Our teacher showed us examples of other kinetic sculptures, things that had motors and gears and parts that required lots and lots of welding, none of which I felt anywhere close to being capable of building myself. I turned instead to the other example of moving sculpture powered not by machines but by nature: mobiles. I loved the way mobiles were animated by nature, a gentle wind blowing the objects into different shapes. I’d studied the mobile sculptures made famous by Alexander Calder. I’d seen a few in person at galleries, and I’d always loved them.

This is when I had my great idea. I’d often been fascinated watching a flock of seagulls collecting and hovering over water. Although made up of hundreds of individuals birds, they created a vision of a larger, organized body. The swirling, snow globe of a flock of gulls was beautiful to watch. It was the graceful movement of the flock I wanted my sculpture to represent. How hard could it be to create a mobile simulating a circling swirl of birds?

Of course, it was very hard. I spent three weeks working on the project—twisting wire, adding weights, tweaking the design—and nothing seemed to work. After about 30 hours of struggling with it, I asked my teacher, Michael, to talk through what was and wasn’t working about the project. He was sympathetic and a good listener. He did not, however, give me any straightforward solutions. Instead, he offered two ideas for me to ponder.

Idea #1:

“None of your work is ever wasted.” Reassuring, especially since I had already invested so much time in a project that wasn’t working.

Idea #2:

“I sometimes find it helpful to listen to the art to find out what it is trying to say.” Listen to the art? What if it didn’t have anything to say? My mobile was absolutely silent, and didn’t seem to have anything to say to me at all.

I decided to start over, to see if I could find a project that was willing to be a little more chatty. I made the decision with a fair amount of panic because the project was due in less than two weeks. Doug and I walked through the aisles of several hardware stores, trying to come up with ideas. I was listening for all I was worth.

Silence. All I heard was the sound of time ticking away.

But then Doug noticed that our local Ace Hardware was selling an old hardware display. It was a huge plywood panel filled with about 300 different sample springs—different sizes, different shapes, different types. I decided it was speaking to me. I didn’t know what it was saying yet, but I bought it. I cut off all the springs and spread them out on our kitchen table. For a week I played with the springs, dividing them into different families, experimenting with their shapes. A full week, just playing and trying to listen.

I decided that I needed the springs to work with something else.  I bought a piece of plywood. I took a straight edge and a pencil and drew a bunch of randomly shaped triangles. Doug helped me cut them into pieces.

Then came a LONG period of experimentation, messing around with springs and triangles. I spent a lot of time talking myself out of frustration and panic, telling myself to listen to what the art wanted to do, telling myself that all the experimentation wasn’t a waste of time. It was like building a house of cards. Just when I thought I’d figured it out, the whole thing would fall to pieces. Slowly—ever so slowly—the sculpture started to take shape. I played with the force of the springs themselves to hold the wood together. I worked to find the way the shapes balanced each other. I painted the wood pieces and assembled it again. It held together by the power of the springs without fasteners or glue.

When I stood back to look at it again, I realized with a growing sense of amazement and joy that my sculpture reminded me of a flock of red birds.

Perhaps my idea wanted to express itself after all. Maybe, just maybe, all those hours spent spinning my wheels wasn’t wasted.

Just like Michael said.

 

The Things We Carry

Maybe it’s just me, but when I was little I was fascinated by air travel. It seemed like such a romantic pursuit to me. People actually dressed up to fly—men in suits, women in Jackie Kennedy dresses and matching sets of luggage.

I was in college when I took my first solo trip by plane, coming home for Thanksgiving after my first term away. I flew from Portland to Denver in the middle of one of the worst blizzards ever. We were in a holding pattern over Denver for three hours. It was not a romantic trip. My second flight was the next year when I flew from Denver to England, meeting up with my study abroad group in London. My flight was cancelled at the last minute (a very harrowing experience for both my mother and me) and I was rerouted through Chicago. I didn’t know how to read my boarding pass when we changed planes and I decided that my best resource was a very chic young woman sitting in the waiting area. She was stunning, wearing a wool dress with matching jacket and pumps. She was also kind, helping me figure out my boarding pass and chatting with me while we waited. She told me she was flying to London to meet her fiance who was a banker or something. I suspected she’d materialized from the pages of a novel. My suspicions were confirmed when she opened her toiletries case, a very smart hard-sided leather box that, looking back, was probably Louis Vuitton. There was a mirror attached to the hinged lid which she used to reapply her lipstick.

I was entranced. I figured that someday, when I was a real grown-up, I would fly to London to visit my hypothetical fiance, and I would carry a beautiful travel case in which my jewelry and makeup would be carefully arranged.

I did make it back to London many years later. I actually got engaged on the trip. Somehow, the beautiful travel case didn’t materialize, but the allure of owning one never went away. Little did I know that it would take a painting assignment and a trip to the Goodwill Outlet store to make my dream come true.

Our final assignment for my class was to do a painting on a 3-D object. It could be anything, as long as the meaning of the object was reflected in the painting. Feeling stumped, I visited the Goodwill Outlet store in town, a huge warehouse with giant, rolling bins crammed with assorted cast-offs: clothes, tools, appliances, toys. I wandered the aisles until I came across a Samsonite toiletries case. It was burgundy, hard-sided, and the latches still worked. The lining was clean and intact, and it even had a little mirror attached to the lid. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t Louis Vuitton. But after handing over three dollars, it was mine.

The idea for the painting came quickly. I was intrigued by the idea of the things we carry through life, the things we choose to take with us on our journeys. Then I thought about the project I had done recently, writing the biography of my client, Jack Jouett. For three years, while working with Jack to record his story, sort through photos and memorabilia, and research his history, I felt I had taken a journey through his life. I would paint the case to reflect my travels.

First, I removed the handle and the mirror and taped off the hardware. Then I painted the case itself, covering the surface with gesso and several thin layers of paint in crimson, turquoise, buff white and a fun paint made with stainless steel. The surface was hazy and atmospheric.

Next, I wanted to add some images. Jack has great photographs, including some taken in the 1940′s when he was a young man living in the Virgin Islands. He’d gone on a sailing trip with some friends through the Caribbean, and the photos from that trip are some of my favorites. I copied the pictures onto photo transfer paper in my laser printer, cut out the photos I wanted, and layered them on the surface of the case.

One of the themes that continually emerged while working on Jack’s story was the idea that he kept circling back to places he’d lived before. Not only had he circled the globe, the events of his life continually carried him back to favorite places:  New Orleans, Washington, DC, China, the Virgin Islands. I decided to stencil a number of different circle designs on the case itself. In many places, the stencils obscured the photographs, hiding them behind paint. I decided this was fitting. Most of the details of Jack’s life were buried by time, as they are for any of us, and working with him was a process of searching for the images that made up his life story. Finally, I covered the surface with a thinned down glaze of burgundy paint, further obscuring the details, but softening any remaining hard edges.

Here’s how the project turned out.

The photographs are visible if you look closely.

And another detail . . .

We had our final critique this week, and my class was intrigued by my project. Not surprisingly, they were even more intrigued by Jack. Of course, I was happy to talk about him and the things I learned circling through his life.

And my travel case? I’m definitely keeping it. It is perhaps the most practical art project I’ve ever done. I could use it to hold my art supplies. It would be a great storage bin for photos or keepsakes. I might even load it up with my makeup and jewelry when I take a trip. Whatever I do, it will remind me to pay attention to the things I carry with me.

Before and After

Ten weeks ago, I walked into Art 131—Introduction to Drawing, one of the first college classes I’d taken in 25 years. I was nervous, both about being in a classroom again, and also because for all of my very vocal enjoyment of art and a general sense that I was somewhat creative, I have never been very confident in my drawing ability. I do fairly well at Pictionary, and can create a reasonable likeness of most cartoon characters, but to draw something real from observation? This is the primary reason that most of my artistic endeavors tend toward collage or abstract designs.

No more. I was finally committed.

The first day of class was spent learning about supplies—the difference between vine charcoal and compressed, what erasers and paper to buy, what kind of portfolio we’d need—so we didn’t have to face our skills, or lack of them, that day. But that changed quickly. When we walked in the second day, the teacher (a wonderful guide named Vicki Lynn Wilson) had filled the center of the room with a giant still life: a mannequin in roller skates, boxes and vases, an umbrella, a large wicker headboard and piles of other . . . stuff. We set up our easels, opened up our shiny, new drawing supplies, and Vicki gave us the entire class period to do an uninstructed drawing. No rules, no help. Just an hour and a half in a quiet room to draw what we saw. She wasn’t being mean; she wanted to gauge the skills we brought to her class.

It was absolutely nerve-wracking. I fussed with my supplies and readjusted my easel for a full five minutes just to delay putting pencil to paper. And  it got worse from there. I didn’t know where to start, how to start, which tool to use. I stared at the still life and sketched. Stared some more and erased what I had drawn. Lurching, fumbling, I somehow got through the time until Vicki asked us to stop. When I looked at my drawing, here’s what I saw.

I was miserable. The drawing confirmed what I already believed: that I didn’t know how to draw. Mercifully, Vicki collected our drawings to keep until the end of the term. I’m sure she knew we’d be tempted to destroy them. I sure wanted to.

Fortunately, things got better. Over the next ten weeks, we learned how to do observational drawing in stages. We worked through each of the elements of design,  learning about line and composition before moving on to perspective,  shading and value. We worked in white charcoal on black paper, black charcoal on brown paper. Eventually we learned color. Week by week we built on previous skills, bringing in our drawings for the class to critique. I became familiar with the tattoo artist who worked with detailed precision, the grandmother and high school teacher who drew images from her home, the  young man who asked intriguing questions and was uniquely drawn to color. I felt connected to them somehow because I saw so much of their art. It felt like I’d seen something of their soul.

Which I had. And week after week, they’d seen mine.

For our final project, we were given free reign. We were to draw objects that were meaningful to us and said something about who were were. We could use any color paper or any techniques. We could work in black and white or in color. I decided to do a drawing about living my life as an explorer. I picked my favorite traveling boots, the leather satchel I found at a market in Italy and which I now use as my school bag, and the journals I kept on a study abroad trip in college. I threw in my favorite fountain pen and and amethyst crystal I’ve kept on my desk for ages. I set up my still life on a table in my laundry room and worked on it for about twelve hours over the course of ten days.

Today, we hung our artwork for the final class critique. This is what I pinned to the wall:

So what did I learn?

I don’t have to figure everything out by myself.

I suppose, in theory, I could have learned much of this on my own from reading books or watching countless YouTube videos. But then again, I got to be 50 years old without ever actually learning how to draw, so there you go. I’m sure it is possible to learn through trial and error, but having someone else share their expertise with you, provide you with structure and ideas, and give you feedback in real time is priceless. It takes a certain amount of courage, energy and resources to expose yourself and your work to a teacher, and even to other students, but as it turns out, this commitment is amply rewarded. Resources abound. There are people out there who want nothing more than to help me.

Break big ideas into smaller ideas.

I figured out pretty quickly that my problem with my first, uninstructed drawing was that I was trying to do too much at the same time. It was like having a pile of building materials—bricks and cement and 2×4′s and nails—and mixing them all together to build a house instead of focusing on them one at a time. Start first with overall composition. What do I want in the picture and where? Then add the shading and the detail. You don’t have to do everything at once.

Take the time.

This was, far and away,  the most important lesson. It takes time to learn how to do something. I spent four to ten hours on my drawing homework each week, and at the beginning of each drawing, it looked like crap. In fact, it looked like crap for about the first two hours I worked. If I weren’t willing to spend at least two and a half  hours when I sat down to work on a project, I would never know what I could do. Yet if I sat with it long enough, working with  patience and trust, I was inevitably surprised by the objects that began to appear beneath my pencil. Honestly, it began to feel like magic. There I would be, sitting in my laundry room with my hands covered in charcoal, James Taylor crooning on my iPod, and suddenly beautiful things emerged from my paper. A jug of tulips, a drinking glass, the weave of a basket. I’d check my watch and hours had passed in what felt like twenty minutes. This was the payoff.

I’ll say it again: learning something new takes time. Mastering something takes a lot of time. They say that it takes about 10,000 hours of deep, concentrated practice to gain mastery, and I think being willing to spend this kind of time trumps talent any day. The trick is to pick something that you don’t mind spending 10,000 hours doing so that the time spent is, in itself, the reward. I’m thinking that being able to make art is worth a 10,000 hour investment in my life.  I’ve already started. Between my three classes this term, I’ve probably spent 300 hours on art since January.

Only 9,700 hours to go.

I can’t wait.

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